WoW’s days numbered?

No this is not a post saying the giant internet dragon is going to die anytime soon. This is more like that my days of bubble priesting etc. may end soon.

Too many neat MMO’s I want to try out coming out soon.

As I have mentioned FF14, I am eagerly waiting for. I have seen the issues and I do not care, I am FF fanboi at heart 😛

On the issue of fatigue in FF14, I see nothing wrong with this. I think in the beginning especially that a way to get people to see all aspects of the game instead of rushing to max lvl is a good thing. Furthermore, what game on release has actual endgame material??? And for people like me who like to lvl…this will only benefit us. 🙂

2.) Tera – ooo sparkly!
-looks impressive, on par with Aion and FF14
-the combat will be A LOT more active then other MMO’s. More akin to an action game like God Of War. Players will have a block move, and will have to watch visual and audio cues from mobs to know when to block, move, stun a mob.
-I do have reservations as it maybe grindy to an extreme. (Hey it is a Korean game!) Aion was a nice looking game, but lacking.

Myeah, someone called my attention to this yesterday, and I kind of went “Eeeeeeeeeeehhhhhh. That sounds like a terrible idea.” and FFXI was all about terrible ideas, so why not XIV as well? ;). 8hr/wk might sound a like a lot, but to put that into perspective when I was playing WoW full time I played about 6 hours a night. So I buy the game on Monday, and by 8pm Tuesday I’ve burned out my ability to level my 1st job untill Sunday rolls around.

So fine, I switch to another job and keep working my way up, right? Except if XIV is anything like XI, I WON’T BE ABLE TO AFFORD TO. Because XI was one hell of a grind and their crafting economy was terminally fucked. Not saying XIV will be like that, but damn.

Anyway, what it boils down to is Squeenix has always been a little obsessive-compulsive about controlling it’s player base. It has a very set idea of how it wants you to do things, and how things int he game should work. The problem is, as I mentioned above, a lot of it’s ideas are really terrible. Some were good, no doubt, but al lot are also soul-crushingly bad, would would be excusable except they refuse to change them.

• It takes at least 15 minutes to get anywhere (via airship) (which you have to pay for) unless you want get a WHM to taxi you (Which you pay -more- for) or use an item with a long cooldown (Warp club) which you pay for (and runs out of charges) or use a player-raised mount (Which you pay to raise, and PAY TO USE THE ITEM THAT SUMMONS IT, WHICH ALSO HAS A LONG COOLDOWN)

• Dying takes you back to your home point, unless rezzed.

• Dying loses you 10% of your total XP, somewhat less if rezzed.

• After level 15 it becomes impossible for most classes to solo anything worthwhile. The idea is to force people to party, I get that. But the problem is nobody wants to get in a party to do anything because of … well, reread the bullet points above.

• Since getting people to quest with you is like pulling teeth, chances are you will need to do most quests by yourself, with the help of Prism powder and sneak oil (Which you pay for) unless you are a WHM. because you can’t actually kill the mobs that are between you and the objective by yourself. Or occasionally even in a party.

• The only viable way to level is to find a full party (15mins-2 hours seek time) and sit at a stationary camp and grind mobs. If anyone else is there you will have to fight them for spawns. At higher levels it can take anywhere from 4-6 hours of straight grind to gain a single level. Which you can lose by dying to a mob that grants no XP if you kill it, though it can still kill you semi-easily. If any member of the party is killed there is a ~20% chance the party will break then and there.

• Some classes are considered worthless by the player base, and seldom if ever receive invites.

• A new class that was introduced came with an ability that BY ACCIDENT (though the usage was very clever) Obsoleted both of the pre-existing tank classes.

• There’s only 3 tank classes (counting the accidental one) and really 2.5 because nobody wants to see a WAR tank. 2 (1+.5+.5)healing classes, 2 support classes, and 14 DD classes.

• The combination of weapon skill elements when Skillchaining doesn’t make any goddamn logical sense and appears to have been designed arbitrarily.

• YOU NEVER EVEN KNOW WHAT THE FUCKING STATS DO, REALLY.
How much ACC do I need? Nobody knows, eat some mithkebabs. How much +Acc do those give me? Nobody knows.

• If you are not a healing class, while soloing if you get low on health you have to sit down and wait for your health to come back. While healing has been sped up somehwat since launch, this process is still very likely to take 1-2 solid minutes at high levels. While resting, any aggroable mob that detects you will attack, and if it hits it will interrupt your healing.

So.. That’s a lot of stuff.. And I’m not really even done, I just got tired of typing..

Now don’t get me wrong. There’s a lot about the game that was awesome. I played the damn thing for 2 years after all, despite everything I just typed out (though I’m not sure if I would have had that sort of tenacity if it hadn’t been my first ‘real’ MMO) but what drives me nuts is that even in the rare occasions that Squeenix would admit something was wrong, most of the time they didn’t do anything about it, when online games are probably the -easiest- of all games to make changes to. Or at least they should be.

So the 8-hour limit seems to be another case of Squeenix going “Look dammit, we designed this game this way, and if it’s obnoxious and you aren’t enjoying it…. Well tough. We ain’t changing it, because WE thought of it.”

I sometimes wonder how well the game would have done if it hadn’t had the FF name attached to it. I think that allowed them to get away with a lot.

Anyway.. not out to piss on anyone’s Cheerio’s here.. but I guess I needed to get that off my chest.